This book results from two workshops at the University of Khartoum, one organized in 2009 and entitled 'Pastoral livelihoods, markets and mobility: emerging orders in Sudan', the other in 2011, entitled 'Institutionalization and regularion: emerging orders in Sudan after the referendum. The book explores the emergent character of social orders and institutional arrangements in Sudan and South Sudan. Recurring patterns of exclusion and ongoing struggles to reconfigure disadvantaged positions are investigated as are shifting borders, changing alliances and relationships with land and language. The book proposes reading the post-colonial history of the Sudans as a continuous struggle to find institutional orders valid for all citizens. The separation of Sudan and South Sudan in 2011 has not solved this dilemma. Exclusionary and exploitative practices endure and inhibit the rule of law, distributive justice, political participation and functioning infrastructure. Analyses of historical records and recent ethnographic data show that orders do not result directly from intended courses of action, planning and orchestration but from contingently emerging patterns. The studies included look beyond dominant elites caught in violent fights for powers, cycles of civil war and fragile peace agreements to explore a broad range of social formations, some of which may have the potential to glue people and things together in peaceful co-existence, while others give way to new violence. Contributions: Emergence and contestation of orders in the Sudans (Sandra Calkins, Enrico Ille & Richard Rottenburg). Part 1: Borders and boundaries 1. Rethinking the role of historiography in Sudan at a time of crisis: deconstructing and reconstructing 'Sudanese history' (Yoshiko Kurita); 2. The long history of conflict, integration and changing alliances on the Darfur/Chad Border (Andrea Behrends); 3. Whose land? Disentangling border claims in Sudan (Douglas H. Johnson); 4. Identifying the South Sudanese: registration for the January 2011 referendum and defining a new nationality (Nicki Kindersley); 5. The order of iconicity and the mutability of 'the Moro language' (Siri Lamoureaux). Part 2: Production and distribution. 6. Competing forms of land use and incompatible identifications of who is to benefit from policies in the south of the North: pastoralists, agro-industry and farmers in the Blue Nile Region (GŁnther Schlee); 7. Small-scale farming in southern Gedaref State, East Sudan (Zahir Musa Abdal-Kareem); 8. Gifts, guns and 'govvermen': South Sudan and its southeast (Immo Eulenberger); 9. Negotiating distributive orders in rural Sudan: justification and critique of charitable gifts (Sandra Calkins). Part 3: Organisation and representation. 10. Greedy donors? Uncertainty and the Organisation of Seed Distribution in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan (Enrico Ille). 11. Institutionalisation and regulation of medical kits in an emergency situation in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan (Mariam Sharif); 12. 'Popular consultation' as a mechanism for peaceful social order in the Nuba Mountains / South Kordofan? (Guma Kunda Komey); 13. How DDR shifted its face in South Sudan (Timm Sureau). [ASC Leiden abstract]